Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Most of the land that the Americans occupy in Okinawa is still legally owned by 31,521 individuals or families who are forced by various laws to lease it to the Japanese government, which, in turn, subleases it to the Americans without charge. These leases must periodically be renewed. In 1991, newly elected Governor Ota exercised the power given to him under the forced leasing laws to renew some 2,636 leases that had expired. This was, he has explained, the “most difficult decision of my life”—the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had made economic support for Okinawa contingent on preservation of the bases.²⁹ In late 1995, with the movement inspired by the rape already growing, he refused to renew any more expired leases, forcing Prime Minister Hashimoto to play a politically unattractive role as lackey to the Pentagon. He had to renew the leases himself.

A sizable number of small landholders have become explicit and outspoken antiwar landlords, including some three thousand Okinawan and mainland intellectuals who have bought handkerchief-sized parcels of base land in order to protest the continued American presence. They are known as the one-tsubo landlords—a tsubo being a measure equal to 3.3 square meters—and have proved a severe thorn in Tokyo’s side. In May 1997, as the leases of many of the one-tsubo landlords came up for renewal, it became clear that the prefectural government would not save Tokyo’s face by forcibly renewing them. Prime Minister Hashimoto therefore introduced and guided through the Diet legislation that transferred all control over leases for base land to the central government. This law is almost surely unconstitutional on several grounds—it deprives Japanese citizens of their property rights without due process of law and it applies to only one place, Okinawa, although Article 95 of the Constitution stipulates that no law can deal with a particular area without its people’s consent.

The most famous of the Okinawan antiwar landlords is Shoichi Chibana. In 1945, his grandfather, armed only with a bamboo pole, attempted to protect his land from seizure and was shot to death. This land, in American hands ever since, is today on the site of the Sobe Communications Facility, one of numerous American installations in Okinawa for eavesdropping on the conversations of the surrounding nations, including Japan, and for communicating with U.S. submarines. In the spring of 1996, the lease on that land expired and Chibana refused to renew it. As a result, until the enactment of Hashimoto’s law a year later, the Americans were illegally occupying Chibana’s land. Much to the irritation of the American and Japanese governments, the Okinawan police forced the Americans to open their gates to Chibana and let him visit his land. On May 14, 1996, he and twenty-nine friends legally entered the Sobe Communications Facility, held a picnic on the lawn, sang Okinawan songs, and conducted a memorial service for his grandfather and father. The Japanese government will go to almost any lengths to avoid a repetition of this widely reported and photographed event.

One of the lengths to which it will go is to spend large amounts of public money to cover the costs of the bases, thereby turning the Pentagon into a central component of the Japan lobby in Washington, D.C. Japan is not obligated by any treaty to do this. The Status of Forces Agreement clearly states that “the United States will bear without cost to Japan all expenditures incident to the maintenance of the United States forces in Japan” except for the “construction of facilities.” But in May 1978, Shin Kanemaru, then chief of the Japanese Defense Agency and one of the legendary power brokers of the Liberal Democratic Party, arranged for Japan to donate ¥6.2 billion toward support of the U.S. forces. Kanemaru dubbed this the omoiyari yosan, or “sympathy budget,” because the American government had said to Tokyo that it was experiencing budgetary difficulties following the Vietnam War and could not cover all the costs of its bases in Japan. Initially the omoiyari yosan covered only the medical insurance of Japanese civilians working on the bases, but the Americans have asked for an increase in the sympathy budget every year since, and by 1997 it was ¥273.7 billion ($2.36 billion), more than forty-four times larger than the original sum.